David Ben-Gurion

This chapter concentrates on the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), and traces the continuum of his positions about the issue of Jewish national self-determination from before World War I until after the Holocaust. Before World War I, Ben-Gurion wholeheartedly supported the continued existence of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of a revised multinational blueprint that was based on his own assessment of “what is good for the Jewish people.” Furthermore, Ben-Gurion copied the idea of “decentralization” from the Ottoman context and made it a part of his vision for the future character of the Jewish state in Palestine as supported by him throughout most of the Mandate period.